Good Bye, Music Collection–Hello Spotify

I was one of the first users of Napster. Then I moved to Kazaa, then I moved to The Pirate Bay and bittorrent.

I was a serious music thief. Yes, yes, I know this is bad, and I know the FBI can come to my house and take my hard drives and throw me in jail. Well, maybe not. It’s only a crime to share music that you don’t own. It’s not illegal to download music. Even if it’s for free. The reason is that you can very well own the CD the song came on, and are within your “acceptable use” to make a digital copy of the song. Well, downloading the song really isn’t any different.

But I digress.

I stopped doing this about 5 years ago. I have 17,614 songs on my PC now. (And yeah, I just took a count, so that’s a good number).

I haven’t listened to a single one in over a year. Hell, it may be 2 years. Those songs are just there, taking up space on my hard drive.

Why?

The cloud. (Yes, I hate that word, and the cloud is not what you think, nor is it where everything is moving).

I started listening to Pandora. You all know what it does. You select a song you like, and it plays more songs like that one.

Simple.

I don’t have a problem with that. Why? Because I get tired of hearing the same damn songs (all 17k of them!) after a while, and want to hear something new. Then it occurred to me, I would rather just have songs streamed to me that way, than going through all mine and selecting the songs to play. It’s more fun when I don’t know what’s coming.

As far as I am concerned, I don’t need to ever own another song. EVER. As long as I can listen to whatever I want to, when I want to, I don’t care if it’s on some server on the internet, or on my hard drive. Why store them all here, when I can listen to them any time.

And now comes Spotify.

I got an early membership to the site. The weird thing is, It’s like having an iTunes library, where you just type any song you want, and it starts playing. It’s more like having songs on your hard drive, and less like streaming pandora. I think there is a way to create playlists, but I have to create them my damn self.

This scratches an itch I had when using Pandora. If I wanted to hear a specific song on Pandora, I had to wait for it to come around. With Spotify, I can just type the song in and BOOM there it is. So it’s the best of both worlds.

AND IT’S FREE

WTF?

I don’t need to buy CDs anymore, I dont need to download songs on iTunes, I don’t need to pirate songs, I don’t need to do anything but connect to the internet and I can hear EVERY song I have ever wanted to hear.